In person, Frank Gehry was not oracular, or overbearing. He didn’t discourse on the history of architecture, even though he changed that history forever. He had a few well-rehearsed stories, but they tended to be ironic or self-deprecating, such as how he once lobbied for a second Pritzker Prize because it had been a long time since 1989, when he earned his first one.
He was joking, of course. His sense of humor was wry and he liked to chatter. After an interview over lunch, sometime around 2012 when he was in Washington defending his innovative design for the Dwight D. Eisenhower Memorial, I despaired of finding anything I could quote in the newspaper. But when I transcribed the recording it all made sense, there was a logic to his chatter, and a through line to his discourse. It just ambled through a thick forest of kibitzing.
It was a fun lunch, which made it all the more surprising when I saw Gehry’s steel spine for the first time. He was appearing at a public conversation during the decade of controversy between his being selected as the memorial designer in 2009 and the completion of the project, which opened in 2020. He had been affable, smart and engaging until an audience member asked a long, rambling, angry question — more of a diatribe than a question — that felt like an attack, not a query. His eyes narrowed, his jaw tightened and he shut the young man down like Hercules swatting a fly.
Gehry died Fridayat the age of 96, a good, long, spectacular life, lived exuberantly and with a legacy that few architects will ever equal. In terms of raw fame, he achieved the same level as Frank Lloyd Wright: He was a household name and perhaps the only American architect about whom even people who don’t care about architecture might have an opinion. His supposedly high-handed genius was mocked on “The Simpsons” and he was the subject of Sydney Pollack’s last film, the 2005 “Sketches of Frank Gehry” — basically 90 minutes of Olympic-level schmoozing about art and life between two old friends.
That fame gave him opportunities, which he often pursued for his own creative satisfaction. Music was a passion, and he took particular pleasure in leaving the world one of its finest venues for classical music, the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles (finished in 2003 after more than 15 years of design, drama and delay). Disney Hall is a delight to move through and to sit in, the acoustics are splendid, and the hall has been instrumental in helping the Los Angeles Philharmonic become one of the world’s most admired ensembles.
The Eisenhower Memorial was also deeply engaging for Gehry, who spoke often and movingly about his admiration for Eisenhower as a man and a politician. Gehry arrived in the United States as an immigrant from Canada in 1947, and his memories of postwar America were both painful (his family struggled financially) and ecstatic (he loved Los Angeles, the culture, the opportunity, the freedom of reinvention). They were also sentimental, a sentimentality which colored his memories of Eisenhower and the memorial he built to the 34th president, which centers on a small statue of Eisenhower as a boy, looking out on the America he will help shape into an international colossus.
Not every Gehry project was successful. The Fisher Center at Bard College, a performing arts space, feels a bit like a large sculpture advertising its Gehry design affixed to a fairly basic, humdrum concert hall. And yet, the last time I went there, two years ago, I liked it more and more, in part because it was doing two things at once: putting a stylish, sculptural face to the world, while keeping everything essential about the building’s function simple and modest.
The Eisenhower Memorial didn’t quite live up to expectations, either, in part because the design review process vitiated many of its original strengths. It was a radical idea, to break with the traditional forms of memorialization and create, instead, a public park, with a large decorated scrim behind it. That scrim, a hanging metal tapestry depicting an abstract landscape, isn’t clearly legible by day. But at night, it is astonishing, a spectral eruption of the natural world in the middle of Washington’s monumental core, in a neighborhood given over to office buildings of generally dehumanizing blandness.
A decade ago, while walking Prague, I came upon one of Gehry’s most delightful buildings by accident — meaning, I wasn’t expecting to see it, and had forgotten that Gehry built it. But there it was, a building colloquially known as Ginger and Fred, or the Dancing House, designed in collaboration with the Czech architect Vlado Milunic. It stands on a corner of Prague that was destroyed by U.S. bombing during World War II, and it seems to be a building in the throes of either destruction or resurrection, or both at the same time. It sways in and bends out, dramatically breaking with the frontage line of the buildings around it. Some people hated that, too, along with its radical breach with the historical styles of Prague. But spend any time in Prague, and you realize its architecture is radically eclectic, with an insatiable tendency to fantasy, elaboration, curvaceous forms and ornament.
How many buildings make you laugh, not at them, but with them? It is mischievous, but solid, a bit like Gehry himself. Watching him during the long years it took to bring the Eisenhower Memorial to fruition, seeing the compromises he made with the Eisenhower family and the abuse he took from them (Susan Eisenhower said the design reminded people of the fences around Nazi death camps), the volleys of inane fury he suffered from critics with an agenda that had little to do with architecture and everything to do with cultural politics, left me with nothing but admiration.
His design vision was extraordinary, and like most visionaries, he occasionally stumbled. But unlike many visionaries, he was enormously practical and down to earth about the nuts and bolts of making a building come together. Critics who admired his work uncritically were too apt to use the word genius, and impute to him all the virtues and some of the character flaws attendant on the idea of genius. And perhaps he enjoyed the label just a little, as any mischievous man accused of genius might?
Around the same time I discovered Ginger and Fred, I was in a small American city that had built itself an art museum that was painfully, obviously, egregiously in the style of Frank Gehry. I won’t say which museum or which city. But it took only a passing glance and a few minutes inside to realize that it wasn’t designed by Gehry, and had none of the practical, problem-solving good sense of a Gehry building. Gehry helped make this kind of building possible, by pioneering the use of software that facilitated the design and construction of unconventional, nonlinear architectural forms.
But the proliferation of bad buildings that mimic Gehry isn’t Gehry’s fault. Nor is he to blame for the tendency to think of architecture as simply a grandiose form of sculpture, a trend in architecture that is abating due to the natural tendency of the profession to revert to pragmatism after periods of exuberance. And he isn’t to blame for the age of the so-called “starchitect,” the dominance of the field by a small number of superstar designers. That, alas, is simply how capitalism conspires with ignorance to reduce any field or human endeavor to its most marketable actors.
Gehry does, however, get much of the credit for the broad public interest in architecture, the comfort that ordinary people have in expressing opinions about buildings, in taking delight — or feeling furious about — the built environment. His fame made it fashionable to be engaged with architecture, and there is always the hope that public engagement can be enlightened, deepened and directed toward a world in which beautiful, healthy, sustainable buildings are understood as a basic right of the human animal, which always needs shelter.
Gehry’s architecture was never merely beautiful. His buildings work for a living and earn their keep. But at their best, they are surpassingly beautiful, and any experience of surpassing beauty has radical potential.
Great beauty makes us restless and needy — a bit like Gehry — and demanding — a bit like Gehry. And when we take that restlessness and need and make demands on the world, things can change.
Gehry’s legacy helps us formulate that demand: We should build a world that delights us.
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